OPEN RECORDS: Legislature backtracks on open-records bill

State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, left, accompanied by Senate Budget Committee chairman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, announced that the Senate will take up a constitutional amendment to establish the California Public Records Act as a non-reimbursable state mandate.

SACRAMENTO â" Assembly and Senate leaders took different tacks Wednesday to escape a backlash over recently approved budget legislation that critics said would encourage local governments to ignore parts of the state public-records act.

Acting on a January proposal by Gov. Jerry Brown, lawmakers last week voted to end state reimbursement of local government costs for helping people with their records requests and to notify people of the status of their requests. That would give local governments the option to no longer provide those services.

Media groups and open-government advocates, who were largely silent during months of budget hearings on the subject, have blasted the legislation as undermining the publicâs right to view government documents.

On Wednesday, Assembly Speaker John A. Perez, D-Los Angeles, announced that his house would pass legislation Thursday, June 20, to restore the reimbursement, which the Legislatureâs non-partisan fiscal analyst estimates could cost the state tens of millions of dollars annually.

But less than an hour later, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg said his house will park the Assembly-approved measure because of the potential cost. Instead, he said, senators will push a June 2014 constitutional amendment to make clear that local governments have to follow the public-records law without any money from the state.

In the interim, Steinberg said, âIf we get word from one public entity â¦ that they are not complying with the public-records act, we will then pass (the Assembly) bill.â

Brown issued a statement supporting the Senate's approach. Last fall, Brownâs Prop. 30, besides raising income and sales taxes, established the stateâs open-meetings law as a non-reimbursable mandate in the state Constitution.

The main mandates at issue are a 2001 law requiring local governments to assist people with their public-records requests and a 2000 law requiring local governments, within 10 days of receiving a public-records request, to notify the person making the request if the sought-after information may be disclosed.

The Commission on State Mandates said both laws were reimbursable mandates. That means local governments wonât have to provide those services if they donât receive state reimbursements.

The nonpartisan Legislative Analystâs Office recommended budget language that became the essence of the trailer bill approved Friday. It recasts the mandates as optional best practices and requires local governments, if they stop providing the services, to publicly declare so in January of each year.

âItâs a little more transparent than just suspending it,â the analystâs office Brian Uhler said this week.

Critics of the legislation, including the California Newspaper Publishers Association, said they were blind-sided by last weekâs measure.

But a spokesman for state Sen. Richard Roth, D-Riverside, who leads the Senate budget subcommittee that oversees mandates, said no representatives of the publishers association or similar groups showed up to speak against the governorâs proposal at an April hearing. Aides in the Assembly gave a similar account for subcommittees there.

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